This is one of those advances in technology that you have to hope will make it big in the not-too-distant future. A team of Ukrainian computer programers have just won Microsoft's Imagine Cup with an extraordinary invention: a pair of gloves that can translate sign language movements into an automated voice.

They got the idea after noticing that deaf students at their college were struggling to communicate with their peers, and decided they needed a solution to better include them in college activities. The resulting project is Enable Talk, a pair of custom-designed gloves with 15 flex sensors and a micro controller that can recognize patterns in sign language. These are then transmitted via Bluetooth to a Windows Phone device, and translated using Microsoft's Speech API and Bing's API. (The team say they're working with other volunteer programmers to make the software compatible with Android and Apple's iOS.)

So far, the gloves can only translate about five different phrases in sign language, according to co-creator Maxim Osika, but in the coming months his team will start programming other phrases into the software with some help from deaf students at his college.

There's a story on it's way based on my interview with Osika, but for now here's an video, edited by one of the folks at Microsoft, of Enable Talk's creators demonstrating the gloves. The action starts about a minute in.